Don’t Forget the Milk!

“And don’t forget the milk.”

Why does she think she has to remind me of everything? I’m not a kid anymore, although you’d never know it by the way she treats me. I feel like I’m at work, but not getting paid.She acts like I’ve never been to a store before. I go every week! I live here; I guess I know as much about what we need as she does. I do the cooking, so I know when I’m running out of something I need, but that don’t count I guess. Every time I’m getting ready to go to the market, out comes the list. She claims my memory is going, and if she don’t write stuff down I’ll forget it. Then when I get back, I’ll begin she says, to grump about not having enough of this or that.

I don’t remember being like that, but then maybe my memory isn’t what it was; but whose is? I got people calling me by the wrong name all the time. Mail gets delivered here to a person ain’t lived here in ten or more years.Course, I’m guessing about the ten years, cause we only been here two, but the ideas the same. And I go to buy something at the pharmacy and the power goes out. The kid behind the counter can’t sell me nothing causse the register don’t work.I know it’s cause he can’t make change, but he’s too damn proud to admit it. What the hell is happening to people? Used to be if you didn’t know something, you’d ask. Now, you go to “search” on the computer. Same concept really, just that you don’t get ridiculed as much.Too bad really; I liked ridiculing, it felt like I was getting even with somebody for something, even if they or I didn’t know what it was. That was the fun in it.

She likes to save money besides criticizing me, I’ll give her that, but it does get annoying. Take this so-called list of hers; the back of a receipt from one of the marts, can’t tell which one, the ink, if that’s what they use, has begun to disappear. It might be cause it was not much to speak of when it rolled out of the machine, or its fading like the rest of us with old age. You ever try and write on the back of something that ain’t two inches wide, two feet long, and has some invisible coating on it so the pens ink don’t stick to?Her writing or printing, hard to tell which, is like trying to read a crossword puzzle of someone who don’t know how they’re supposed to work. Letters missing, sometimes a word, and I’m supposed to know what she had in mind.She’s got the numbers right; it’s the letters she can’t seem the right place for. If she hadn’t been hit by that car, I’d tell her to do the shoppin herself.

She said, “that car came out of nowhere!”

I asked what she meant by nowhere?

She said, “one minute she was there and the car wasn’t, and the next, she was still there, and the car was.” It’s usually how it works, but some people don’t pay attention to the realities of life.

I asked if she was in the cross walk? Maybe get a settlement out of the insurance. She said she didn’t know, she was busy playing Dragons From Hell, or one of those games that’s supposed to be free, and help keep you from getting old timers disease. I know it’s called something different, but I can’t remember those foreign names.Anyway she’s supposed to stay off her feet for a few weeks, she claims to be a might dizzy from the medications; don’t know how she can tell. She don’t like the side effects, so is talking about goin back to home remedies, like putting butter on burns, and blowing cigar smoke out your nose when you are stuffed up. Last time I tried one of her remedies I damn near killed myself; nearly drowned. She got one of those thing that works like a vacuum, but it’s got water instead of air and blows backward instead of forward.You hold it to your nose and it shoots water in and out of your nose. Has another foreign name I can’t remember, French I think. It would have worked I suppose if I didn’t have a….. cleft they calls it, in my nasal passage, which diverts anything goin past to a place it was not intending to. But I guess drowning is better than her stinking up the house with cigar smoke.Someone should think about putting it in paint now that the lead is gone. Cigar smoke sticks to anything, and you can’t get it out no matter how much scrubbing she does.

So anyway, I get to the store and pull out the list, but only cause I know if I don’t get everything on it, whether it’s there or not, she’ll think I hadn’t looked at it, and then the missing letters and words on the list will be the least of my worries.She’d got a temper for someone so old.You’d think she’d be concerned about having a heart attack, or more likely a stroke when she’s carrying on like it was my fault the Titanic sunk. I wasn’t anywhere near the ocean I don’t think when it that happened, hell I wasn’t even born yet. But being irrational is part of being angry I guess, you ain’t thinking of what you’re saying, as much as who and how you are saying it. When I’m saying she’s old, I don’t mean in terms of years as much as attitude. You know all that stuff they should teach in school but don’t, about genetics, well she somehow managed to get stuck with an emotional psyche, hope I spelled it right, of someone born in the late 1800’s. Could have been anytime in the 18’s I guess, I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t say if was right or wrong about my accuracy.

She thinks like a buggy whip manufacturer who can’t see the writing on the barn wall. Cars were not miracles just because everyone thought they were. They were, if you know anything about environmental degradation, looked that word up, that the automobile, as it was once called, need gasoline to work, horses only needed hay, and you didn’t have to go all the way to Venezuela to get it. That is when everything, especially the air started to go to… well you know where.We were poking holes in the ground, well I wasn’t, but some of the entrepreneurs who went on to be president were.Then the population started growing, and there were enough young people we could afford to lose a few and still have an economy that was being built on poor wages and only working six days a week.The two World Wars helped curb the population a mite, but then the women’s movement came along and there were too many workers and not enough jobs, so the wages stayed the same, but the cost of everything went up. It was a time that gave sane people cause to wonder what they were working for. The wealthy were getting wealthier, and the poor, well they was still poor. I can vouch for that. And then, just as things started looking up, our president, who didn’t think much of people sharing in the fruits of their labors, started busting up the unions again.It had been done before, this time they didn’t have to use goons to beat up people, they had cops and politicians.

Anyway, here we are.I don’t know rightly where you are, but I’m at the store thinking of how everything I look at is in plastic, wrapped in it, or it has already become part of our cellular makeup. I like that word cellular, reminds me of telephones. There was a time before recycling became the talk of the town, when there was no need for it. Everything came in something that was used again for something else. If it didn’t, you figured you were being outsmarted, and because being outsmarted was kin to be called stupid, you didn’t buy whatever it was you probably didn’t need anyway. As far as I can tell, it was the good old capitalistic system working the way it was intended to. You stop buying, they stop making, some go home happy and some don’t.

I been here an hour and forgot what I’m here for; then I remembered the list. I didn’t really need it; got a mind like a four-year-old, and as Groucho used to say, “he was glad to be rid of it.” People used to have sayings like that I understood. Now days I feel like the country has outgrown my ability to keep up, not only physically, but verbally. Half the things people say I don’t understand.It’s like the language changed while I was trying to figure out why there is a church on every corner, and at least one bar. I don’t know if going to church first, and then goin to the bar, or vice versa, is what puts the spirit in you. Not understanding the words anymore ain’t the reason I had to quit goin to church, it had more to do with them changing the language as well. Once they dropped Latin as the official language, I couldn’t tell what was happening. I’m all for official languages, but why only one?

They talk about language having a mystique that goes along with it. Like the romance languages. Then there are the Slavic languages, they make you want to cry cause you don’t know what it was you done wrong, and then they tell you, but in a language you don’t understand . English, well English I don’t know about. It depends on whose English you are talking about. English, English, is nothin like American English, and Australian English, well, that ain’t my kind of English. I can’t understand how so many vowels get into places I’m used to hearin syllables. So I don’t think we are romantics, and we only make people cry on purpose, so that ain’t it; I just don’t know. It could be as they say, it got lost somehow in translation, even though English is supposed to be English.

So that gets me back to the list. I’m presently by the meat department where everything is overpriced, when I compare my buying power to that of production costs. Now they get help on the production end from the government, who gets its money from me. I don’t get any help to afford the product, the government would have to give me some money back to do that, which I don’t have enough of to qualify. I get the too big to fail thing, but how about, too little to fail, that would be a change in the old wind sock I could relate to. But then I don’t get to make the rules, so I’ll just go on paying exorbitant taxes, and those that make the rules will continue getting exorbitant help, and I’ll just have to practice the capitalistic idealism they claimed I was raised under. I decided I won’t buy anything I don’t feel is affordable. If I don’t buy, and you don’t buy, according to the rules, the price is goin to have to come down, or they are goin to have to go away. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Not being able to read what she put on the back of the receipt makes it difficult. Normally, if I didn’t have to use the list, would have made my own, mentally. I’m not claiming to have a photogenic memory, but I do see things for keeps. But I hadn’t planned on not being able to use her usual list, so I have to go through the pantry visually and virtually, and create an alternative list based on what I remember seeing. That sounds easier than it is, cause I buy groceries for two other people in the neighborhood who no longer drive, not because of DWI’s, speeding or inattentive driving, nothing like that. Their children took away their car keys, claiming they were a danger to themselves and the public. One of them said he hated driving anyway, so it made no difference to him. And the other one said they “felt like they’d been stabbed in the heart with a rolled-up debit card.” I let it go at that, sometimes best to not get in too deep by asking, I didn’t have all day to pay my respects.

You see my predicament.I have three different pantries to separate in my mind, and I’ve been here an hour and a half already; people like to talk. I think it has to do with the loneliness epidemic goin on. People spend so much time talking to the TV’s, the radio, themselves… they have forgotten how to talk to other people. I know what that’s like. I don’t talk to other people because I can’t, but because I don’t like to.Old people can be depressing, and I’ve got problems of my own. Well, you know that, and I’m only on aisle 4, rice, refried beans, and tortillas. Some things I’m afraid to eat, not because they are harmful necessarily, it’s just that when you are used to potatoes and various potato accoutrements, it’s hard to jump over to something you can’t pronounce, and then feel good about eating it.I’m always being told to try something new, but no one says what that should be. Left on my own, I revert to what I know. I never knew beans were fried in the first place, let alone fried again and sold as new. You can learn something every day, but do we need to?

I know from experience that sometimes things don’t work out like they are supposed to, I’m used to that.I’m going to come back tomorrow with a list I can read, and hopefully the stamina to get past aisle number four.I also know I’m going to have to make up a better excuse than that I couldn’t read her writing; I’ve tried that one before.Being honest never works with some people anyway, so you might just as well make up a lie and be done with it.I might try the one where the store was being held up by a masked man and his Native American companion, and they wouldn’t let me in; it’s worked before, and it’s been a while. I was tryin to be politically societally correct.

Now all I’ve got to do is find my car and remember where I live. I’ve spent too many nights at Emily’s; one of the two I buy groceries for.I think she’s lonely, and I’ve found eatin for free helps with the capitalistic problems I’ve been having.You should give it a try. It’s a good way to get out of the house, and help a lonely person who’s been stabbed in the heart by a rolled-up debit card pass the time.